The High Court of Paris handed down a €10,000 fine and a ban and this week preventing Apple employees from working during the night at seven Apple stores within France. The ban prevents Apple from making retail employees work between the hours of 9 PM until 6 AM the following morning. The court also instituted a penalty of €50,000 per provisional infringement if Apple has employees working between those hours.

"This decision is very good and reflects the desire of Justice to enforce the night work", welcomed Eric Scherrer, CFTC trade employees, which emphasizes "a severe sentence."

"We just ask that the law is respected," Thomas responded in turn Bordage SUD trade, which explains that "the shops close at 2100, but the time for employees to put everything in order and work in workshops some may work until 11:00 p.m. ".

Under French law, working at night between the hours of 9 PM and 6 AM needs to be justified to ensure the continuity of economic activity or social utility to be legal.

First, there are no socialist countries in europe. Much like the US most countries are constitutional democracies (or monarchies in name) with social security systems. It really confuses me to keep hearing about supposedly socialist countries in europe, when there hasn't been any relevant planned economy since the early 1990s.

Also, the statistics on productivity need to be considered very carefully. For Norway, it is largely driven by the amount of Oil and free electricity from water power they own. For the US, it is even worse, because the US has not only Oil and other natural ressources to sell, it also has a lot of income from international companies, where the work is actually done in other countries but the profits are recorded at the headquarters in the US. Of course that is true in a similar, if lesser, fashion for most of the larger european countries.

If you want a real comparison you need to compare the income from productive jobs only, without trade and natural ressources playing into it. Even then, the number does not tell the complete story.

TIn my field of work, europeans work for 35 to 40 hours a week with 30 holidays while north americans work for 45 to 50 hours a week with 20 holidays. But people in the US have a lot more social life take place at the office, celebrating birthdays and such. And of course the japanese "work" easily 80 hours a week, but actually sleep in the office. So "one hour of work" is not really an internationally usefull unit of measurement.